Zenoss makes project of the month!

Zenoss won the Sourceforge project of the month recently, and ironically enough, SingleHop utilizes this brilliant piece of software to monitor network statistics and customer servers. Zenoss is rich with many features that sets it above the competition.

Auto-discovery, which is the automatic importing of services into the Zenoss database, is one of the many bells and whistles that Zenoss offers. This not only allows us to schedule discoveries to add new customers to our monitoring system, but it also adds device configuration details including interfaces, memory, disk, OS, services, processes and installed software.

Zenoss also has the ability to track inventory. However -- we have another system for that. Like most monitoring systems, Zenoss also polls service nodes for performance statistics and graphs them using RRDTool for our server technicians. This helps us troubleshoot problem servers, and also keep track of bandwidth usage. All our services are monitored using the SNMP protocol, and WMI for windows services.

What would a solid monitoring application be without alerting features? This is the server where all our Quick Reaction customers' services are monitored. SingleHop syndicates all it's service alerts via Zenoss, using the email protocol, which is parsed and sent via our internal communication protocols. This allows our technicians to notice problems the second they arise and resolve the situation in a timely manner. Like Nagios, there is also an escalation feature which will alert our on call administrators of major issues with our critical infrastructure.

The above features are also easily navigated in the Zenoss web interface. I personally enjoy the way it organizes devices and how fast it is, for as many services we monitor. Zenoss is a python-based zope application, which contains a powerful object database, and rich framework as its platform:

Zenoss is also *very* efficient. We run the application on a PentiumD 3.00ghz server, with 2G of RAM. It has been online since SingleHop launched and is showing no signs of going anywhere soon! Zenoss has a demo server available to check out: